Vort

Maybe. But I see MGTOW as something far more insidious. Like feminism itself, MGTOW's foundational assumptions and claims are not completely specious; on the contrary, many such claims are exactly on the mark. This fact makes MGTOW, like feminism, more dangerous rather than more true. It's easy to see the excesses and evils of feminism. Just look around. It's not as easy to see the evils of MGTOW, because our society is not yet conditioned to look for them. We may be with MGTOW today at the point that feminism was with the US population in the 1960s, with a lot of people nodding and saying, "You know, they have a point." Feminism has proven to be one of the most malignant societal cancers of our time; much of the corruption and decadence of today's United States can be laid at feminism's door. MGTOW, if left unchecked and unchallenged, will be as cancerous as feminism, and might well complete the evil that feminism began: The dissolution of the relationship between men and women, and the resulting utter destruction of the family. This is and always has been feminism's ultimate goal. Honestly, MGTOW is no different. This is a bitter pill for me. I recognize the truths that MGTOW preaches, and some part of my mind and spirit rejoices that, finally, someone is willing to point and state openly that the emperor has no clothes. But mainstream MGTOWism is not merely a rejection of western feminism; it is a dismissal of the feminine altogether, a proclamation that women are nothing but vaginas to be used at will but never bonded to. Ironic, really. Modern feminism glorifies women as of inherent, intrinsic worth, requiring no other condition besides a vagina to be revered and protected, while MGTOW accepts the value of women as being that same vagina, and nothing more. It's easy to say that feminism brought MGTOW on itself, but that's like saying your skin cancer brought on the bone cancer, so good riddance to both. As alluring as MGTOWism might be to many men, it is not the correct response to modern feminism. It is ultimately a furthering of the same evil that feminism represents. We would never want our daughter or our sister or our wife or our mother to be treated as MGTOW often portrays. If we see women, even feminists, as sisters and daughters, we can perhaps see through MGTOW at what we should really be striving for.

Which accounts for both the color and the taste.

Many today worship a God who bears only passing resemblance to the God of our fathers. 2 Nephi 28:7-8 has never been more reflective of society than it is today: Yea, and there shall be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die; and it shall be well with us. And there shall also be many which shall say: Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God—he will justify in committing a little sin; yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; and do all these things, for tomorrow we die; and if it so be that we are guilty, God will beat us with a few stripes, and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God. Verse 9 names this abomination for what it is: "...false and vain and foolish doctrines..." It's easy to blame this mess we are in on the irreligious and godless. Easy, but wrong. The godless wicked, like the poor, we have always with us. Theirs is the common condition of fallen humanity. They are to be pitied and reclaimed by love as errant brothers and sisters, not reviled for their perceived filthiness. The problem, as the mortal Christ taught, is not the wicked of the world, but the wicked who claim to know God but who act contrary to His will and commandments. The hypocrisy of one who has received the things of God and who claims to be God's disciple is inherently more damaging (i.e. more wicked) than the hypocrisy of the worldly hordes strolling the halls and thronging the observation decks of the great and spacious building.

More to the point is that a "wartime economy" is a sort of a fiction. It is a short-term measure that is unsustainable for more than perhaps a decade. It is inherently consumptive and inflationary. Real economic gain means real wealth creation that is generalized throughout society. Wartime economy appears to cause this by ramping up war industry production, but that mainly just gets people working at jobs. In and of itself, that doesn't create wealth, and the product created is consumed by the war effort. Jobs per se do little or nothing to create wealth; otherwise, we could simply have a set of people digging ditches on Monday and another set filling them up on Tuesday. old (I think) alluded to our need to have a common goal or set of goals, which we don't really have. "Make a lot of money" is too meta and doesn't count as a common goal. I do think that World War II created real economic benefit for the US, but I firmly believe that is because it created real product and service, including building the infrastructure to allow mass creation—which I admit is also sort of meta, but in this case I think it was an actual, tangible side effect of the WWII war effort.

Just curious: Why is it that those who vote for Trump are expected to apologize for their vote and explain their thinking, while those who vote for the far more vomitous Biden feel no such constraints? I openly admit I don't particularly like Trump, but I will make no apology for voting for him. The choice between him and Biden is so clear that it is not even a choice, like "choosing" between being locked in an outhouse for an hour or being tortured to death, or between having your tonsils removed or your eyes gouged out, or between eating steak medium rare or well done.

Great write-up. Nephi was enough of a metallurgist to recognize on sight (at night, no less) that Laban's sword was made of very fine steel—fine for the time, that is. Modern steel would doubtless have been tougher and maybe harder, certainly of much higher purity. Nephi's obvious metallurgical knowledge and ability to refine and alloy other metals, including gold but also copper to make bronze, perhaps even iron to some degree, marks Nephi (IMO) as a smith. In my own private intracranial Book of Mormon movie, Nephi at twelve is already apprenticed for some years to a smith and has gained a lot of facility in the smithy (shop). So he's able to identify fine steel on sight. When God tells him to build a ship, Nephi is immediately aware of the need for tools and how he has to find copper and zinc and other ores to make a durable bronze for creating woodworking tools, a thing which probably would not have occurred to me or to most other people who haven't worked with metal as a smith.

(I prefer the term "Jew hatred" because it's not really a Semitic thing. Plenty of people hate Arabs, too, but it's not the same as Jew hatred.) I guess this is supposed to be clever. My IP (in Redmond, WA) is conveniently disallowed from doing edits on Wikipedia. Otherwise, this particular oh-so-funny joke would have already been at least temporarily removed.

Florida swampland might at least put you close to a Church ranch.

Not sure I have ever considered myself a proud Republican. Possibly in my very early adult years, during Reagan's term, but even then I've never been much of a party identifier. For a few decades now, I have been a "proud Republican" only in the sense that I'm proud of not being a Democrat. I believe I last voted for a Democrat 35ish years ago when we were in grad school in Pennsylvania. As I recall, I lived to regret casting that vote, though the Republican candidate was hardly any better.

Not merely popular, but positively unavoidable when you're born and reared in a tiny village, with your nearest neighbors being other tiny villages within a day's walk of you, and no automobiles or technological public transportation to get around easily. Cousin marriage was the norm in some areas, and many traditional cultures still exalt cousin and other close relative marriages. My very good Muslim friend from grad school told me several times that the ideal marriage for a Muslim man is to marry his older brother's daughter, i.e. a man should marry his niece. This would all but ensure domestic felicity and harmony. Sounds a bit icky to us, but that was the traditional belief. If I understood my friend correctly, traditional societies in Saudi Arabia and other Arabic countries continue to view ideal marriage through that lens.

His wife was his double cousin, a first cousin on their mothers' side (mothers were sisters) and a second cousin on their fathers' side (fathers were first cousins to each other). Probably easier to get to know your spouse when they're family. "We met at Grandpa's*." *Actual comment made to Sister Vort and me many years ago when getting to know a lovely young couple who were first cousins.

I get the "Verifying" message. Then it flashes "Leave us, you nonbiological entity!" and after that, I can't access the site. I can't identify [FLAG—Noncommon term detected. Replacing with synonym from Common Terms list] figure out what's going on. It's so confusing. I guess I'll go eat a breakfast of swine flesh and red junglefowl embryos like all my fellow humans. Just normal human stuff, the kind of thing we all know and do every day without really thinking about it. Just like I don't think about it.

Not generally into the black metal/screamo scene, but this is gold. I could listen to this all night. Which would be a very bad thing for my job tomorrow, so I won't. But I could.

What a great tune. Some people just have it in their brains and/or souls to create stuff like this. I have no such gift, but I'm sure glad other people do.

Observe any university-level conversation among black progressives regarding marriage of blacks to whites, especially of black men to white women.

Curiously, they don't mind the sex. It's the commitment of a formal, public legal relationship that they object to.

Agreed. "Bisexual" means "having two sexes", and applies to species as a whole. For example, humans are bisexual, male and female.

The US Supreme Court will never review a state-level conviction based on state law. I mean, they could, technically, but I don't think the justices want to muck around in the state's enforcement of their own statutes. In the state of New York, the fix is in. Everyone knows it. Everyone sees it. The officials were literally elected based on their promise to convict Trump of a felony. The corruption is not hidden away.

The Bible I grew up reading portrayed Christ as someone who always showed compassion and warmth to those who deserved it, and quite often to those who didn't. There were exceptions, sure, but I think it's pretty clear that the foundation of Jesus' biblical ministry was love (which, yes, is different from acceptance or tolerance). The point is that it's much different from being "nice". ("Kind" is another matter.) Yes, I frequently see this story cited by "Christians" trying to justify hateful behavior towards minorities, foreigners, and LGBTQ people. But what type of person was it that Jesus was truly going after with whips and flipping tables? I'll give you a hint: I have to agree with this. I would also note that Christ drove the moneychangers out of the temple. Jesus' ministry was to the house of Israel, not to the Gentiles, with whom he seldom interacted. I think you missed both the point and the ending of that story. Again, I have to agree. That train left the station long before the 60s. True enough that sexual libertinism is hardly a new thing that has come about only within our lifetimes. But it's obvious that the 1960s "sexual revolution" constituted the open overthrow of previous societal limits on what had theretofore been considered antisocial sexual behavior. Pretending otherwise doesn't change the substance of old's argument. There's no need to be hyperbolic. He is not being hyperbolic. His statement is literally true, as I expect everyone here (including you) can attest. No more than telling someone else that they need to be tolerant of homosexuality, or that they need to avoid defecating on the street, or that they need to wear Old Spice cologne. Yes, for heaven's sake, please do not get started on such ahistorical, context-free nonsense.

Went to lunch with my cousin over the weekend. He's one of the smartest people I know, and one of the most insightful. He had nothing good to say about Trump. He considers Trump to be an existential threat to the democracy. He would literally vote for Biden over Trump (though I'm quite sure he would never actually vote for Biden, whom he despises). I have to admit, he makes a compelling case. I have not seen things in that way, and I still do not. But I understand better now why some people would simply refuse to consider voting for Trump under any circumstance.

Seems like James Earl Jones was portraying his near-namesake Jim Jones in beckoning a young woman to her death to illustrate the riddle of steel. Thulsa's solution to the riddle of steel—"flesh is stronger than steel"—ends up being something like: Control, not physicality, is power. Or in more LDS-friendly terminology: Being a thing to act is more powerful than simply being a thing to be acted upon.

Funny. I don't see the legal consequences for Biden's open lying about his and his son's doings. Strange, that.

I've always enjoyed Elder Roberts and valued his opinions, but this particular one has never made sense to me. What does "combined intelligence" mean? Are ten million three-year-olds combined smarter than you? What might that even mean? IMO, the whole topic is an exercise in forcing a vast eternal truth into a tiny mortal framework. Can't be done. The conclusion itself has no base reference, so no conclusion reached from making the effort can be trusted even to mean anything, much less be correct.

Nice pun.